paging

Related Terms

)A technique used by virtual memoryoperating systems to help ensure that the data you need is available as quickly as possible. The operating system copies a certain number of pages from your storage device to main memory. When a program needs a page that is not in main memory, the operating system copies the required page into memory and copies another page back to the disk. One says that the operating system pages the data. Each time a page is needed that is not currently in memory, a page fault occurs. An invalid page fault occurs when the address of the page being requested is invalid. In this case, the application is usually aborted.

This type of virtual memory is called paged virtual memory. Another form of virtual memory is segmented virtual memory.